AlanBarber.Org
Sunday, August 31, 2003
Hello Advanced-Basic.Com visitors
If you're confused because you were trying to visit Advanced-Basic.Com and ended up here don't be. No it didn't get hacked! I'm the owner of both sites.Advanced-Basic.Com has been long since dead for months now. I quit writing CGI scripts and no one was visiting. So this weekend I decided to just finally kill off the site and have it redirect to here.
Anyhow sorry for the hassle folks.
on 08/31/2003 at 01:07 PM
Friday, August 29, 2003
MTV VMAs, all flash and no substance
the MTV freaks will do anything to get attention.Here's what the producers conversation probably sounded like:
Producer 1: This is going to be a shit VMA show. Same looser corporate music sellouts are going to win the big awards.
Producer 2: Yea I know. No one is going to be talking about it. What are we going to do?
Producer 1: We need to do something to shock people. Hey you remember the 2000 Movie Awards? Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair kissed on the stage! People still talk about that. Lets get some performers to kiss.
Producer 2: Well we're thinking of having Madonna, Britney, and Christina do a big song and dance. 3 girls kissing will cause an uproar of publicity.
Producer 1: That's great! Let's go get loaded and rig some more votes.
They force some girls to kiss (none of them looked like they wanted to do it) because they know it'll get lots of attention on the news channels. Every morning show on CBS, ABC and NBC showed clips and talked about the kiss and nothing else! I think I saw CBS and ABC each mention that what's his name beat Johnny cash and that was about it.
Big yawn. The VMAs are just like every other award show. A place to make us sit through a few hours of them all pretending to be regular joes that care and not the ego-centric asshats they really are.
This is why I don't watch award shows. It's all just a bunch of fakes and phonies. I prefer to spend my time watching shows that actually involve my brain.
Cue the weekly reminder...
And that's why I love Dead Like Me on Showtime! Ok I know it's corny and I'm always pimping the show, but I just love it. I'm going to keep pimping it until everyone knows about it. Ever since my beloved Farscape was cancelled by the morons at SciFi I'm going to make sure to get everyone I can to watch it so the ratings stay high and my shows stay on the air. I'm tired of good shows being cancelled before the creators/writers decided to end the show.
Remember Fridays at 10:00pm Eastern/Pacific on Showtime. That's channel 537 (SHOe) for you Direct TV viewers!
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Google Rankings and this site
Heh, funny thing happened today. It's been about 2 months since I last downloaded and processed my website access logs. So I downloaded and processed them today. I found there wasn't that much activity on the site. However the activity that was there probably 90% is coming from google searches.I figured that was a bit odd as no way my site would be important enough to even shop up in the first 1000 results, or so my belief was. Low and behold to me this site is actually showing up in the first page or two of a few selected search terms.
I've heard the complaints about google and blogs but I never figured my little old site would deal with the issue.
So without further ado here are the 5 most common search phrases and the page the site shows up as:
1) "disable windows messenger" - page 1
2) "out of order showtime" - page 2
3) "necromancer guide" - page 1
4) "outlook express takes a long time to load" - page 2
5) "animal crossing universal codes" - page 3
It's sort of a love / hate relationship. On one hand I'm happy because it's getting me good traffic. On the otherhand I feel guilty because there are better sites for some of these topics that should be higher up on the list than me.
Bah! What do I care! I'm getting real visitors for a change. I love you google.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
FreeBSD has native Java support!
Good news for FreeBSD users. Yesterday the FreeBSD foundation announced that they worked out a deal with Sun and can now distribute a compiled binary version of the Jave VM and Dev Kit. This means no more having to download and patch the Linux version of Java to use on FreeBSD. It's designed for FreeBSD 4.8 but should work on all 4.x versions. It won't run on the 5.x line due to some bugs but they're working on getting this corrected quickly.
You can read the whole announcement here but below is a expert:
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/20030825-java131.shtml
"Boulder, CO - August 25, 2003 - The FreeBSD Foundation today announced the availability of a binary distribution of the Java JDK version 1.3.1 for the widely used FreeBSD operating system.
Wes Peters of the FreeBSD Core Team commented "This announcement hallmarks a new era of Java support for FreeBSD. Having easy to install binary Java packages will ensure that all users can enjoy the benefits of Java technology on the FreeBSD platform."
Java users can download, without charge, the FreeBSD Foundation's Java distribution from http://www.FreeBSDFoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml{{PERIOD}} The FreeBSD Foundation is also providing OEM licenses to FreeBSD distributors, permitting them to ship out-of-the-box Java support with FreeBSD."
Monday, August 25, 2003
So many games not enough money
Being a poor jobless college student can really suck! There are a ton of killer games out or being released this fall for the GameCube and I can't afford any of them. Why must game makers charge so much for games? I know it's a common rant but really folks, is $50 as good as they can do?
Buy two games and you're out a 100 bucks! That's just crazy. Especially since the replayability (is that even a word?) of many games is very low. For a while there game makers were all into the replayability and you had games like Diablo that would randomly generate dungeons. This at least gave you the illusion that every time you play it's a new game. So many games are basically rail shooter now days were you navigate a bunch of narrow levels. It just seems like we are getting forced to pay too much for so little.
Oh sure it costs millions to make the games with all the fancy motion capture, special effects, and full motion video cut scenes. The problem I think is that game makers feel they have to use these things or the game isn't as "good" or considered a second rate game. They get so caught up messing with these "features" that they start to skimp on the actual game play.
At 50 bucks a shot I don't want just some interactive movie, I want a fantasy world that I can become a part of. A world that draws me in and lets me enjoy myself for while before getting bored. If game makers don't feel they can provide a good enough game then they need to cut back on the frills, focus on the core game, and then release it at a discount.
Honestly I believe games should not cost more than 30 dollars. AAA titles should be 29.99, second tier games 19.99-24.99, and that junk games that they know no one wants to play 9.99 to 14.99.
That way for a young kid that works his butt off can afford 3 maybe 4 games for a 100 bucks instead of just 2.
Anyways enough of my rant. Here's the top 10 list of games I want in no particular order:
1) Soul Calibur II
2) F-Zero GX
3) Maro Golf: Toadstool's Tour
4) The Simpsons Hit and Run
5) StarCraft Ghost
6) Mario Kart: Double Dash
7) P.N. 03
8) Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles
9) Wario World
10) Enter the Matrix
Saturday, August 23, 2003
The perils of my life
Haven't posted in a few days because I've been a bit busy, nay more like disposed of.
Well Thursday I was in front of the computer all day playing blogshares. I literally spent most of the day buying and selling pretend stocks trying to get "rich".
However Friday morning sometime between 1am and 4am the power went out. It didn't come back on till around 5pm that day so not like I could even get on the net. However luckily I did have plans so I didn't sit around the house all day complaining about no net access.
I went to my grandparents house to setup their computer. It has gotten toasted by lightning and I brought it to my place to fix. It's a good hours drive and on the way my car started acting up again. I know what the problem is since it's happened twice before! I've already called the shop and will take it in Monday to get it fixed. Of course Monday is also my first day of fall classes so things are going to be crazy as usual.
I swear the big guy upstairs just likes to tease me every once in a while to remind me life isn't all fun and games.
Wednesday, August 20, 2003
FreeBSD 4.9 Release Announced
Saw the newsflash today at FreeBSD.Org that the code freeze for the FreeBSD 4.9 release will start on the 25th of this month.
The code freeze is the first step in preparing to build a new release of the operating system. For those people interested here's the Release Schedule they will follow. If all goes well then FreeBSD 4.9 will be shipping around the end of September.
There are obviously many questions about whether this will be the last release for the 4.x line of FreeBSD. No one knows for sure as it really depends on how the 5.x line progresses. If they believe 5.x finally reaches a good level of stability and performance they may end the 4.x line. However more than likely we will be seeing at least one more release in the 4.x line.